Germaine Greer quotes:

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  • Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.

  • Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.

  • The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

  • It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

  • Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.

  • All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.

  • Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require 'educational practices and socializing agents' even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people's behavior from their earliest childhood.

  • Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

  • We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

  • Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.

  • You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

  • If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

  • The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.

  • The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.

  • Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.

  • The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee.

  • All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.

  • Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature.

  • The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

  • Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

  • I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.

  • Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.

  • It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.

  • Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

  • One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

  • We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'.

  • A housewife's work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not.

  • The point of an organi family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies.

  • We can only afford two children' really means, 'We only like clean, well-disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals', for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family's whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time available.

  • It is agreed that 'girls take more bringing up' than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.

  • War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man.

  • Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.

  • Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the spiritual athlete must crash through.

  • A garden is a kinetic work of art, not an object but a process, open-ended, biodegradable, nurturant, like all women's artistry. A garden is the best alternative therapy.

  • In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband's fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried.

  • The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges.

  • The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistadorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern.

  • The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities.

  • Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

  • Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labor, and even more, free labor exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favor.

  • Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one's fertility.

  • What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.

  • After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is.

  • The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.

  • People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.

  • Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?

  • Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilisation and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.

  • Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.

  • Security is the denial of life

  • It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.

  • Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

  • Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves

  • The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.

  • Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

  • Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

  • Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.

  • If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.

  • The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity.

  • The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy, and envy.

  • Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust.

  • A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

  • The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.

  • Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.

  • I'm passionately opposed to the nuclear family, with its mom and dad and their 2.4 children. I think it's the most neurotic life-style ever developed.

  • The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles.

  • It is in our interests to let the police and their employers go on believing that the Underground is a conspiracy, because it increases their paranoia and their inability to deal with what is really happening. As long as they look for ringleaders and documents they will miss their mark, which is that proportion of every personality which belongs in the Underground.

  • Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.

  • It is agreed that little girls should have a different physical education than little boys, but it is not admitted how much of the difference is counseled by the conviction that little girls should not look like little boys.

  • We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional.

  • Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

  • Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

  • How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women?

  • If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism

  • Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.

  • Marriage made more sense when it was indissoluble. It's the woman trying to cope with the strains of a one-parent family who will suffer most from the relaxation of the divorce laws.

  • Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.

  • The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

  • The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

  • It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley's propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women's Liberation.

  • I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

  • Our life-style contains more Thanatos than Eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity.

  • I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I've always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I'd fall in love with a woman. Damn.

  • In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.

  • Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.

  • We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.

  • Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

  • Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities. To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it.

  • Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.

  • Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.

  • Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

  • Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?

  • Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.

  • The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

  • English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.

  • Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well.

  • Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.

  • Act quickly, think slowly.

  • A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck.

  • A garden is the best alternative therapy.

  • A woman is never so happy as when she is being wooed. Then she is mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes, until that day of days when she sails down the aisle, a vision in white, lovely as the stefanotis she carries, borne translucent on her father's manly arm to be handed over to her new father-surrogate. If she is clever, and if her husband has the time and the resources, she will insist on being wooed all her life; more likely she will discover that marriage is not romantic, that husbands forget birthdays and aniversaries and seldom pay compliments, are often perfunctory.

  • A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.

  • As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.

  • As soon as we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we know that our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism.

  • At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and "handsome is as handsome does," she was emerging as the central emblem of western art.

  • Awareness of time as flying has some advantages; it precludes boredom, for one thing. It matters little that younger people find older people boring or slow. Older people have a right to resist being rushed, to stand and stare at the fragile world that has become so unspeakably dear to them. For the lucky ones, who will not have to leave while they are still in love with life, there will come a later time when that passion too will fade, but while one is still possessed by that great tenderness, it must be yielded to.

  • Because love has been so perverted, it has in many cases come to involve a measure of hatred.

  • Bollocks have never frightened me. I'll eat a bollock any time.

  • Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not.

  • Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to.

  • continuing sexual interest and perfect sexual adjustment between partners who have been together for thirty years is so difficult and rare that no one should feel guilty or inadequate for not having managed it.

  • Despite a lifetime of service to the cause of sexual liberation, I have never caught venereal disease, which makes me feel rather like an Arctic explorer who has never had frostbite.

  • English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave.

  • Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.

  • Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.

  • Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says 'What would I do without you?' is already destroyed.

  • Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband's favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to rejectthe consensus of opinionand find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both.

  • Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother

  • Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter.

  • Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.

  • Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.

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